Marshfield man makes 11th-hour bid to avoid deportation

Friday

Oct 27, 2017 at 9:03 AMOct 27, 2017 at 9:13 AM

Neal Simpson The Patriot Ledger @nsimpson_ledger

MARSHFIELD - Kong Xin Chen is a little more than a month away from being forced out of the country and indefinitely separated from his wife and young children, but he was just as busy as usual at his Marshfield restaurant this week, serving food for his loyal customers and hoping for a miracle.

Chen, an immigrant from China who has lived under the constant threat of deportation since 2012, is making a desperate 11th-hour bid to re-open his case after learning last month that immigration officials are no longer putting off his removal under an 18-year-old deportation order. The father of two is holding out hope that officials will show him mercy, but he’s already bought a plane ticket just in case and has considered the prospect of selling his family’s popular restaurant and saying goodbye to his children to return to a country where he no longer has any family.

Chen’s friends and many loyal customers are again rallying around the family, as they did five years ago when immigration agents raided their home above the restaurant and detained Chen for three months, but this time they say they’re armed with new information buried in Chen’s case file that they hope will make the difference in his case.

“We didn’t have all the facts,” said Lynne Ann Habel-Murphy, a Marshfield resident who helped advocate for him in 2012.

Chen, now 43, came to the U.S. from China in 1993 at the age of 19 after a group of smugglers came into his impoverished village and promised him U.S. citizenship for a steep price. Chen says he was brought through Moscow, Hong Kong and the the Dominican Republic before finally landing on a beach in Puerto Rico, where he was almost immediately detained by immigration agents.

Chen could have made a case for being allowed to stay in the country then, but he missed two immigration hearings in the 1990s and a deportation order was issued for him without his knowledge. Chen says his lawyer, whom the smugglers had directed him to, never told him about the hearings. In fact, he said, he didn’t even know who the lawyer was.

“I’ve never seen him,” Chen said at his restaurant, Mandarin Tokyo.

This month, Chen’s supporters learned the name of that lawyer: Robert E. Porges, a prominent immigration attorney in New York who in 2002 admitted to helping hundreds of Chinese immigrants submit fraudulent applications for asylum in the U.S. Porges’ wife and partner said in federal court that she had worked closely with smugglers who would kidnap immigrants like Chen until they paid their fees, which could be between $40,000 and $50,000.

The Porgeses pleaded guilty to racketeering and tax evasion and were sentenced to 97 months in prison. Both were released in 2009.

Habel-Murphy, a friend of Kong who discovered the link to Porges in a stack of immigration documents, hopes the new information will convince immigration officials to reopen Kong’s case in immigration court. A previous attempt to reopen the case failed and Kong has been able to stay in the country for the last five years because an immigration field office director in Burlington had been granting him a stay of deportation each year.

When Chen requested a stay of deportation this year, he was abruptly denied without explanation except a letter saying that the director had determined that a stay was “not sufficiently warranted.”

Stays like the ones Chen received are intended to give immigrants facing deportation more time to pursue legal options or make final arrangements and are usually issued at the discretion of field office directors. The stays, which ICE considers a temporary benefit, are only issued for immigrants who give a specific, verifiable reason why they need it.

Chen’s attorney, Joshua Goldstein, was expected to file a petition Thursday to re-open Chen’s case, which supporters hope will help him get a new stay of deportation. Goldstein could not be reached Thursday.

Habel-Murphy said the frustrating irony of Chen’s case is that he never tried to hide his immigration status from the government. Over the years, he’s paid taxes, obtained state and local licenses for his restaurant, filed paperwork for his employees, married a U.S. citizen and raised two children who are also U.S. citizens. Kong could apply for citizenship too if it weren’t for his deportation order.

“If he had a legitimate lawyer 24 years ago, he’d be a citizen,” Habel-Murphy said.

Habel-Murphy said the campaign to help Kong – which has included lobbying state lawmakers as well as a fundraiser, petition and website, www.freekongnow.com – is not about making a political point about immigration. Instead, she said Chen’s supporters are just trying to help friends who contribute to their community and set an example that many Americans could aspire to.

“He reminds us of the older generation that built this country,” she said. “Their work ethic reminds us of our parents and grandparents. He’s an honorable man.”